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Lee Harkins' Thoughts
In our business, Customer Retention must be our ultimate goal! Your competition has been successful in stripping away at your business. These independent service providers are fighting for every customer they get! Your fight must include focusing on making your operation “different” than before! Remember, they disqualified your operation because of the way you were. Not changing anything and then thinking they will return is a poor strategy.
M5™ can help you and your dealership develop tactical methods to advance your business. Call us for suggestions! It would be our pleasure to help.
Thank you,
Lee Harkins
President and CEO
M5™ Management Services, Inc.
leeharkins@m5ms.com
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Practice Makes Perfect!
by: Jack Fitzpatrick
Well maybe not perfect, but it makes life a whole lot easier at times. In today’s economy some of us are lucky enough to have a service and parts department that is producing profits on a regular basis. Great job, but now is not the time to sit back and relax and pull a muscle patting ourselves on the back.
Now is the time to take a good look at your operation and figure out where you might be able to improve. Think of the star athletes, past and present, of the world. People like Derek Jeter, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, Jerry Rice, and the like. The one thing that they all had in common was that they were never satisfied!
There are many stories of how Jordan and Pippen used to have these late evening private practices, and Tiger was relentless with his golf instructor. That’s right even Tiger Woods had somebody teaching him how to play golf better! (Ok insert joke here) Point being is that these are people who were perhaps the best in the business at any particular time, and be that as it may, they always had the time to try to improve. Can’t we do that by taking a closer look at our fixed operations?
- When is the last time you did a competitive local market survey to ensure that all of the highly visible and comparable work that we do on a regular basis is priced according to the market in your area?
- How about hanging out in the Service drive in the morning, and observing how your Service Advisors are interacting with the customers?
- Are they performing proper walk-arounds, or is that something we need to implement?
- When is the last time you restructured your Service menu? Get with the Parts manager, and develop some new cost averaging, and have a shop meeting with some of the techs and advisors and have a menu pizza party one night to shake things up for the better!
- When is the last time you sat down with a stack of 150 repair orders? It’s amazing the information you can gather from looking over these repair orders one by one. Proper write ups, Techs overselling, or not making offers at all, etc. This is a priority, regardless of your profitability.
Everyone who does well at their job has one thing in common; they’ve practiced their talents and skills.
The very best Service Advisors take their technical background and ability to read people and practice what to say to motivate their customer to accept a recommendation. If you do develop a new menu, make sure your advisors are presenting not only what we are going to do to the vehicle, but why, as well!
Have a contest to with the Parts manager, GM, and maybe even the Dealer and have each advisor pitch a 30,000 mile service and the overall winner by the panel’s decision gets $100 gift card to a local restaurant. Do something different to keep it fresh and exciting.
We are now hitting our stride in the summer months where we are usually pretty busy, but the leaves will be falling sooner than later and when it’s raining that’s obviously the worst time to fix a leaking roof. Heck! Maybe your roof isn’t even leaking, but I would error on the side of good, and be a good Boy Scout and be prepared!
Ladies and Gentleman all I can ask is that you install some consistency and accountability in your process, and inspect what you expect.
A little practice never hurt anyone!
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Skid Marks
Skid Marks is an ongoing article series that shares the lighter side of working in a service department. All the stories are true. Brand names and real names have been removed.
I remember a time when I was a Service manager at a small import store. I had only five technicians, and all very good. But my shop foreman was exceptional, and when I say he was exceptional, I mean it. He was fantastic. Productive, thorough, and handled dispatch very well. Now with only 5 guys in the shop, including him, it’s not rocket science, but dispatch is never perfect, and you rarely find the situation where everybody is happy regardless of the size of the shop.
He could turn 75 hours, and still dispatch the shop to a productive level, and make sure that the work completed was of the highest quality. Now I am not some pie in the sky manager, and think that he was superman, but he was about as close as it got for me.
I am a person that is among the firm believers that once you get a tech that is between 130%-140% productive that they eventually would be cutting corners somewhere, but he was one of the exceptions, and through my career I have seen a handful of these types. But let’s talk about a day when “SUPERMAN” had a bad day.
It was a typical morning. Busy out of the gate, and he had the shop jumping with the initial barrage of waiters, etc. He was working on a car that had a few items on it, including an oil change. He completed the work, and turned in his paperwork to the advisor, and away the customer went. Well about 15 minutes passed and the customer returned and said that “the oil light is on, and the engine is making a lot of noise”. That’s not good...that’s not good at all!
Well naturally we put the customer’s mind at ease, and let him know that it’s probably something “silly”, and we’ll have you back on the road in no time. I grab the keys, and bring the car into the shop, and the engine was clacking like a pair of maracas on Cinco de Mayo!
My shop foreman sees me pulling into the shop, and the first words out of his mouth were “I forgot to put %$&#@&% oil in the car! Well he was right. Bone dry, and those lifters were singing. He fills the car with oil and then we install a can of one of the “Fluid companies” magic oil additives, let the car run, and hoped for the best. Well guess what? Within 5 minutes that car was as quiet as when it first pulled in the shop.
The look on his face was priceless. He knew right away what happened before I even said a word. Now I am not a huge fan of the “snake oil” companies, but in this case, I’m sure it helped. This particular car line is known for having strong engines, but terrible transmissions. Popular opinion was right, and thank God for Superman that was the case. The customer left after we told them, let’s say, a little white lie, but the car was back many times afterward and never showed any ill effects.
We always made sure my shop foreman didn’t get that car as a joke whenever it came back in for service.
If you have a funny story that you'd like to share with your peers in the industry please send them to newsletter@m5ms.com and we will include them in a future Skid Marks article. Please remember that we will remove ALL brand names and real names.
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